Posted on 11/13/2004 11:12:00 AM PST by LouAvul
The bellicose attitude toward France of President John Adams,' administration alarmed Madison. The XYZ AFFAIR brought the United States and France close to war. During the subsequent turmoil in the United States, the administration won passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Madison believed severely threatened free government. In protest he drafted the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and a report defending them in 1800. These papers stated most fully Madison's concern to protect states' rights, but he advocated neither nullification nor secession, as John C. CALHOUN and others later asserted. Rather, the resolutions and report represent an important chapter in an evolving constitutional doctrine to defend civil liberties against encroachments by the federal government.
Happily retired to his Virginia farm, Madison practiced scientific agriculture, helped Jefferson found the University of Virginia, advised Monroe on foreign policy, arranged his papers for posthumous publication, and maintained a wide correspondence. He returned officially to public life only to take part in the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829, where he sought both to diminish the power of Tidewater slave owners and to extend the franchise. His compromise efforts fell before pressure from proslavery forces to preserve their dominance. Nationally, Madison wrote in support of a mildly protective tariff, the National Bank, and, most importantly, the power of the union against nullification. He stoutly denied that he had advocated nullification in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798. In fact, his whole career and his most profound political thought rested on securing for the United States the benefits of union. http://www.geocities.com/bkestory/madison.html
Thanks.
I think Lee left Texas shortly after Twiggs surrendered the Federal forts and much of the Federal equipment to Ben McCulloch. That was in the second half of February.
The city of Baltimore may have wanted to commission Lee to organize troops to defend the city, but I don't know whether they actually ever contacted him about it. Events were moving pretty quickly at that point for both Lee and Baltimore.
Yawn.
"[T]he General Assembly doth solemenly appeal to the like dispositions of the other states, in confidence that they will concur with this commonwealth in declaring, as it does hereby declare, that the acts aforesaid, are unconstitutional; and that the necessary and proper measures will be taken by each, for co-operating with this state, in maintaining the Authorities, Rights, and Liberties, referred to the States respectively, or to the people." - Virginia Resolution
"RESOLVED, That this commonwealth considers the federal union, upon the terms and for the purposes specified in the late compact, as conducive to the liberty and happiness of the several states: That it does now unequivocally declare its attachment to the Union, and to that compact, agreeable to its obvious and real intention, and will be among the last to seek its dissolution: That if those who administer the general government be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by that compact, by a total disregard to the special delegations of power therein contained, annihilation of the state governments, and the erection upon their ruins, of a general consolidated government, will be the inevitable consequence: That the principle and construction contended for by sundry of the state legislatures, that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it, stop nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who adminster the government, and not the constitution, would be the measure of their powers: That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy: That this commonwealth does upon the most deliberate reconsideration declare, that the said alien and sedition laws, are in their opinion, palpable violations of the said constitution; and however cheerfully it may be disposed to surrender its opinion to a majority of its sister states in matters of ordinary or doubtful policy; yet, in momentous regulations like the present, which so vitally wound the best rights of the citizen, it would consider a silent acquiesecence as highly criminal: That although this commonwealth as a party to the federal compact; will bow to the laws of the Union, yet it does at the same time declare, that it will not now, nor ever hereafter, cease to oppose in a constitutional manner, every attempt from what quarter soever offered, to violate that compact" - Kentucky Resolution
In fact, Madison was horrified that Calhoun and others would bastardize Madison's words to promote disunion.
where do you see in the Virgina resolutions an appeal to secession or nullification?
Madison's resolutions were more conservative then Jeffersons.
T]he General Assembly doth solemenly appeal to the like dispositions of the other states, in confidence that they will concur with this commonwealth in declaring, as it does hereby declare, that the acts aforesaid, are unconstitutional; and that the necessary and proper measures will be taken by each, for co-operating with this state, in maintaining the Authorities, Rights, and Liberties, referred to the States respectively, or to the people." - Virginia Resolution
The Cincinnati newspaper note is an interesting aside.
Wrong. Judicial Review was already a well recognized concept suggested in the Federalist papers and carried in the traditions of English common law. It simply had not been affirmatively exercised yet.
The Resolves represent dissent against the Alien and Sedition Acts, which ran quite apparently against the principles of the Constitution, as amended.
Yes, and they also represent sovereign actions by two states declaring those laws unconstitutional (virginia) and nullified (kentucky).
Virginia declared the laws unconstitutional, thus making them null. Kentucky simply used a different terminology - the word null itself. Madison's may have been slightly more conservative than Jefferson's in that it did not contain as much rhetoric to explain the state's position WRT the creation of the union, but not by much!
I have never seen the Lincoln movie but I agree with your assessment that he was a nut case.
Only a cretin would argue that said orders were not valid on their face.
No, Madison was for neither nullification or secession.
He declared the laws unconstitional but was going to resist them constutionally.
The Shadow knows.
The Booth diary is, of course, historical record. It is on display beneath Ford's Theatre. The FBI file on the diary is File No. 95-216208 of October 3, 1977.
Brown was never charged with treason, nor convicted of anything.
"Mayor Brown was arrested on September 17, 1861, and imprisoned at Fort Warren, Massachusetts, until November 27, 1862, by order of General Dix, the Federal officer then in command at Baltimore. The cause, or excuse, was his payment of wages to police officers who had been ordered off the city police force by General Dix. Mayor Brown ultimately became Chief Judge of the Supreme bench of Baltimore City." Walker Lewis, Without Fear or Favor, 1965, p. 534.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH36/gutzman1.html
The closest antebellum parallel to the Republicans' state of mind in the 1790s was that of the South Carolina Nullifiers in 1831-1833.67 The Nullifiers formally propounded the theory of interposition anonymously drawn up by Vice President John C. Calhoun, which resuscitated the Principles of '98, particularly Virginia's third resolution, to prevent enforcement within South Carolina's borders of the federal tariff.68 Thus, Madison became the center of the debate over state sovereignty and nullification. Each side requested his support; he explained why his past pronouncements did not mean what they seemed to mean.
Left unclear by Madison's letters during this period is the reason he chose to recant his position of 1798. Seemingly,
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it would have been easy for him simply to state that he had been concerned in the 1790s with the prospect of the imposition of an unrepublican police state, so state interposition was appropriate. The tariff, he could have said, might be inequitable, even unconstitutional, but it did not justify "calculat[ing] the value of the union."69 Instead, after saying that, he went on to lay out a consolidationist view.
Instead, Madison's response was to insist that the Virginia Resolutions and the Report of 1800 had not meant that any state had the right to nullify a federal policy. The Madison of 1830 was much more like the Madison of the Philadelphia Convention than like that of 1798; while Madison the opposition politician had participated in the partisan extremism of the 1790s,70 since 1800 he had become increasingly convinced that federalism, the "extension of the sphere," held out the promise of secure republicanism to as many as would take advantage of it, rhetorically inquiring,
May it not be regarded as among the Providential blessings to these States, that their geographical relations[,] multiplied as they will be by artificial channels of intercourse, give such additional force to the many obligations to cherish that Union which alone secures their peace, their safety, and their prosperity?71
In 1830, Senator Robert Y. Hayne, Carolina's champion in the famous Webster-Hayne Debate, sent Madison a copy of his speeches. Hayne obviously expected the author of the Virginia
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Resolutions to endorse the doctrine of nullification. In response, Madison adopted totally different ground.72 He disapproved of the notion that a single state could nullify any statute which was not so oppressive as to absolve that state of all responsibility to the union. He added, "[T]he Constitution of the U.S. . . . must be its own interpreter according to its text and the facts of the case.73 [Madison's emphasis] The charter was that of one people [emphasis added] and could not be negated but by the whole people."74
This was a modification in doctrine that had been rendered necessary by Calhoun's strict fidelity to Virginia's formulation of 1798. Madison feared that one state would act to nullify through a specially chosen convention (as South Carolina eventually did); he felt compelled to deny the legitimacy of such action. It was exactly the opposite of the view he had taken as Publius forty years before and later in the Report of 1800, when he had called ratification a federal act (thus recognizing state sovereignty).75
He next stated that the supremacy clause governed the question; if that failed, impeachment might be tried, then amendment. Madison closed with the incongruous statement that the failure of all these remedies would entitle a state to resort to the law of self-preservation, but that that was a right the government need not respect.76
Referring to the debates over the Virginia Resolutions, Madison told Hayne:
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the tenor of them does not disclose any reference to a constitutional right in an individual State to arrest by force the operation of a law of the U.S.77
Interstate cooperation, he said, had been the aim of the General Assembly. If either the understanding of the other political actors of 1798 or the plain meaning of the section of Virginia's third resolution reproduced above is to be trusted, this statement, with its implication of exclusivity, was simply untrue.78 The phrase "null[,] void & of no power or effect" had been deleted, showing, claimed Madison, that nullification had not been in Virginia's mind. As for Kentucky, he incorrectly stated,79 "nullification" had never been part of its resolutions.
Then followed a passage dealing with the mutual cessions of authority to the federal government by the states, which proved that they were all yet equal, an argument which ignored the question of what would happen if one state or a minority of states were discriminated against via a power not granted to the Congress by the constitution or through employment of a constitutional power in an unintended fashion (the circumstance Hayne claimed to face).80 Madison then arrived at what must have been for him the central problem with nullification: it presaged the end of the union. He referred Hayne to Federalists 39 and 44.
SOURCE: Walker Lewis, Without Fear or Favor, 1965, pp. 448-9.
The stage for these events had been set by the secession of the South and by President Lincoln's call for troops to Washington. Their only route by rail ran through Baltimore, where they had to change trains and cross town to the Camden Street station of the B. & O. On April 19, 1861, a mob attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry while making this transfer. In the ensuing melee four soldiers and eleven civilians were killed.These were the first fatalities of the Civil War. They occurred on the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, which had drawn the first blood in the American Revolution.
The mayor and police had received no advance notice of the arrival of the troops, although it had been requested. Accordingly, no escort was available when, about noon, the Massachusetts regiment pulled into the President Street Station and started across town in railroad cars drawn by horses. Nine cars crossed safely. Then Southern sympathizers dumped a load of sand on the tracks. The gathering crowd, aided by Negroes from Southern ships at the adjacent wharves, hauled heavy anchors into the way. The remaining cars were forced to turn back and 220 Massachusetts infantrymen had to dismount and march on foot.
Someone now paraded a Confederate flag ahead of the troops, and Union sympathizers attacked the flagbearers. This triggered a wild free-for-all. Cobblestones, bricks, and bottles hurtled through the air. Muskets were snatched from stragglers and at least one soldier was bayoneted with his own gun. Finally, the soldiers fired. The first civilian casualty was a young lawyer, Francis X. Ward. He survived; others were less fortunate.
After the first onslaught, an officer ordered double time. This increased the mob's frenzy, just as dogs are made fiercer when a person flees. While running, the troops could not shoot effectively at the attackers in their rear; instead they poured a haphazard fire into spectators clustered on sidewalks and street corners. One of those killed was a boy who had climbed a docked vessel for a better view.
The bloodshed would have been worse had not Mayor George William Brown rushed to the rescue, followed by a detachment of police. He brought the troops to a walk, stationed the police in their rear, and convoyed them to Camden Station, holding high an umbrella to identify himself and to protect the soldiers with his person.
Although the troops were reunited safely at Camden Station, there was still one more casualty. Robert W. Davis, of the firm of Paynter, Davis & Co., dry-goods dealers, had been inspecting some property on the outskirts of town when a trainload of soldiers passed him on its way towards Washington. He shook his fist and was immediately shot and killed.
That afternoon Mayor Brown called a mass meeting in Monument Square, attended by Governor Hicks and leading citizens. A deputation was sent to President Lincoln to implore him not to bring further troops through Baltimore. As a further precaution, it was determined to burn the railroad bridges connecting the city with the North, and the militia were ordered to do so. It was the performance of this order that constituted John Merryman's offense.
What United States forces?
Do you mean Beast Butler and Massachusetts forces???
UNION CORRESPONDENCE[247]
No; 96.
FORT SUMTER, S. C., April 7, 1861.
(Received A. G. O., April 13.)Col. L. THOMAS,
Adjutant- General U. S. Army:COLONEL:
I have the honor to report that we do not see any work going on around us. There was more activity displayed by the guard-
[248]
boats last night than has been clone for some time. Three of them remained at anchor all night and until after reveille this morning, near the junction of the three channels. You will see by the inclosed letter, just received from Brigadier-General Beauregard that we shall not get any more supplies from the city of Charleston. I hope that they will continne to let us have onr mails as long as we remain. I am glad to be enabled to report that there have been no new cases of dysentery, and that the sick-list only embraces six cases to-day.
I am, colonel, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
ROBERT ANDERSON,
Major, First Artillery, Commanding.
To the extent that Lincoln exceeded his constitutional powers, he became a serial rapist of the Constitution and earned the title of the Great Usurper.
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